Seagull Scientific Launches New RFID Enterprise Edition

In September, Seagull Scientific released an entirely new edition of BarTender named "RFID Enterprise." The new edition has all the same label design, printing and automation features as Enterprise Edition while adding many new tools to simplify RFID "Smart Label" design and printing. The RFID Enterprise Edition of BarTender becomes the new highest-end offering in Seagull Scientific's line of label design and printing software. The new RFID features work with Drivers by Seagull version 7.0 (or higher). These were also released in September.

Making the Design of "Smart Labels" as Easy as Possible
Seagull Scientific continues its tradition of flexibility and ease of use with the RFID label design and encoding features in BarTender’s RFID Enterprise Edition. With simple mouse motions, you can "drag and drop" RFID objects onto label designs as easily as you can create bar codes and other label objects. Seagull makes RFID data formatting easy too, providing support for the latest tag types and EPC data formats. Support is provided for nearly every RFID-capable printer on the market. For more details, see below.

Because the data in an RFID object is intended for "invisible" tag encoding via radio rather than for printing, all RFID objects are displayed on screen in the empty design space next to the label.

New Features in RFID Enterprise Edition
The RFID Enterprise edition of BarTender provides:

• RFID Object – Provides all the controls needed to format RFID data.
• Shared RFID Data – The data in an RFID object can easily be shared with text and bar code objects located on the label, which of course do print. This allows scanning using both RFID and bar code hardware, providing redundancy in the event of a non-functional RFID tag.
• Standard RFID Data Formats – Numerous standard RFID data formats have been saved as BarTender components so users may begin RFID encoding almost immediately. Custom RFID data format designs can be quickly saved as RFID components for future use on other label designs.
• RFID Tag Images – Seeing the tag on screen makes it easy to avoid design conflicts such as positioning a sensitive bar code over the RFID chip, a mistake that can lower print quality. Using Page Setup, you can turn the display of the RFID tag image on or off. You can specify standard RFID tag bitmaps, included with BarTender, or add your own custom images.
• RFID label stocks – BarTender gives users a head start on their label designs with its large, built-in database of label stock information from a wide selection of label manufacturers and converters. RFID Enterprise adds a variety of commonly-available RFID label stocks with the RFID tags shown in the correct locations.

Future-Proofing your Investment
The RFID Enterprise edition of BarTender provides:

Smart label technology is new and developing rapidly. As new RFID standards and hardware become available, new capabilities will gradually be added to the RFID Enterprise Edition. Fortunately, BarTender is designed to prevent users from having to frequently purchase expensive upgrades. Much important BarTender functionality is provided by new printer drivers and component modules (such as tag and data formats) that are often upgradeable by free download. This makes it less likely that you will need to purchase upgrades of the full software package in order to comply with minor changes to available RFID tags and standards.

For more information on the RFID Enterprise Edition, please visit the following pages:

• Seagull Web Site
• RFID Enterprise Edition Supplemental Brochure
• List of Supported RFID-Capable Printers and Tag Standards